It’s the mother of all disasters; the worst of all possible outrages. Britain is at risk of having as Prime Minister a man who is widely regarded as “a thoroughly decent man”, an honourable man, highly committed to his principles, a man who speaks of a ‘kinder, more just society’ and asserts that he would never press the button to initiate nuclear war. Unthinkable!

The Secret Services are in fear of the prospect of divulging information to a ‘Terrorist Sympathiser’ and the Military is talking of a coup. The media, after a relentless, fortnight long barrage of manipulation of the public mind based on the attacks in Paris are now wooing a public ‘consensus’.

Not, of course, the kind of consensus that is evident among Jeremy Corbyn’s grass roots support, where 75% are opposed to bombing Syria, but of the kind that we have seen throughout Western Democracies over the past decade. Again, the media is seeking the kinds of consensus in which a tissue of transparent lies, lies that are obvious to the real international community. And if again that community came onto the streets in their millions they will again be brazenly ignored by the politicians whom they ‘democratically’ elected, presumably despite them being so gormless as to be fooled by these same transparent lies and too lacking in the basic faculties to see as the general public saw in 2003, that violent invasions were not the answer to 9/11.

But the wars of 2002 and 2003 in Afghanistan and Iraq were not only violent and aggressive and therefore illegal, they were also profoundly immoral; utterly sinister in the way that Iraq was systematically disarmed by demanded compliance with a rule of law that was flagrantly disregarded when the pre-meditated and cynically calculated attack took place and in the case of Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations and most ill-equipped to defend itself. Not only were they immoral for the lies used to justify them or the wicked way they were conceived and conducted but also for their purpose; to allow the richest companies of the richest countries to steal resources and further increase their military and geopolitical advantage over other nations.

Today, the Coalition of the Killing is, like Macbeth, in blood stepped in so far that, should they wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er. The Western World is ready to commit itself to go on and on in the Bush ‘Crusade’, which, carried to its conclusion, must find itself seeking to murder almost a fifth of the world’s population. Perhaps this is not a problem for the psychopaths who think of it all as just ‘collateral damage’, ‘don’t do body counts’ and consider the deaths of half a million children a price worth paying for a ‘Regime Change’.

Certainly, it isn’t a problem for the British Media, in particular the BBC for whom the democratic consensus behind Corbyn is not of the right kind. Their preoccupation is with gloating over the prospect that Corbyn will learn a bitter lesson in ‘Political Pragmatism’ for his folly in adhering to the principle that the elected Parliamentary Party should be expected to vote with their conscience on such matters. Pragmatism trumps Morality any day, and of course, foolhardy it is that the ‘Blairite’ Parliamentary members left there in the wake of Blair should be expected to have any conscience.

After the air-time saturation with Britain’s ‘solidarity’ with the French there is little time, in this great democratic debate within a free society, to hear any alternative view such as the one aptly put by Code Pink that:

“Daesh did not arise out of a vacuum. We in the West must look to our own imperial state violence, including the disastrous, immoral, and illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, as having created the chaos that allowed the spread of these “non-state” actors who now threaten indiscriminate violence from the Middle East to Europe.”.

Nor could it be mentioned that if the men of ISIS are soulless, barbaric killers, perhaps it could be accounted for, if many of them are Iraqis, if we consider, as is so eloquently stated by William Blum that:

“the people of that unhappy land lost everything – their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighbourhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood, and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lying in wait for children to pick them up … a river of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again”.

Not a problem for the masters of ‘British Democracy’ who, in their feverish rush to bomb Syria, want to pretend that ISIS can be eradicated by retaliating. Or do they really care?